The Singapore Memorial stands in Kranji War Cemetery, fourteen miles north of the city of Singapore, on the north side of Singapore Island, overlooking the Straits of Johore. The central avenue of the cemetery rises gently from the Stone of Remembrance near the entrance to the Cross of Sacrifice, beyond which flights of steps lead to the terrace on top of the hill, on which the Memorial stands.

The Memorial consists of twelve wide columns bearing the name-panels and supporting a flat roof which gives protection to the inscribed names and shade and shelter to the visitor. Rising through the roof in the centre, to a height of 80 feet, is a great pylon surmounted by a star. On a curved panel at the foot of this pylon are inscribed in English these words:

1939-1945

On the walls of this memorial are recorded the names of twenty-four thousand soldiers and airmen of many races united in service to the British Crown who gave their lives in Malaya and neighbouring lands and seas and in the air over Southern and Eastern Asia and the Pacific but to whom the fortune of war denied the customary rites accorded to their comrades in death.

An additional inscription, "They Died for All Free Men" is engraved in Hindi, Urdu, Gurmukhi, Chinese and Malay.

At one end of the memorial to those who have no known grave is a separate small memorial commemorating over 100 men who died in captivity and are buried in a single grave in the grounds of Singapore Civil General Hospital; at the other end a similar separate memorial bears the names of over 250 men buried in isolated places in Malaya where their graves cannot be maintained. A further memorial in the cemetery commemorates almost 800 officers and men of the Indian Army whose remains were cremated. The registers of these three memorials are to be published separately, along with the register of Kranji War Cemetery, where are buried more than 4,000 of the comrades of the men in whose honour the Singapore Memorial was built.